‘Return To Oz’ Is The Most Fascinatingly Imperfect Film Available On Disney+

In 1983, the Walt Disney Company found a director for their Oz project in ace editor/sound designer Walter Murch. It was a long time coming for Murch, who was there at the forefront of the remarkable American 1970s film scene but lesser known than such peers as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Blame it on his unsexy role as the man behind the curtain of the Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, American Graffiti and Dragonslayer. When Coppola left The Conversation with the script in disarray and scenes left un-shot to start work on Godfather II, it was Murch that assembled all the fragments into my single favorite movie of all-time. When Disney fired Murch from Return to Oz for falling behind just a couple of weeks into its production, George Lucas flew to England, declared the finished footage to be more than adequate, and then got the rest of Murch’s buddies (Coppola and Spielberg chief among them) to agree. Murch was rehired two days later. The product is Return to Oz, a popular failure as fascinatingly imperfect as the broken things that inhabit it.

Murch’s plan was to adapt L. Frank Baum’s next two (of fourteen total) installments: The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz for his film. Realizing he could never catch the lightning in a bottle of the 1939 Wizard of Oz, he hewed closely to Baum’s work (and William Denslow’s illustrations), reintroducing in the process Baum’s critique of economic caste systems, his support of women’s suffrage, his brutal disdain for windbag politicians like William Jennings Bryan (whom it was rumored Baum had modeled the Cowardly Lion upon). Dorothy is Baum’s avatar for the common man. Her desperate struggle against belligerent fools intimidating the desperate masses behind a curtain of strongman bullying and psychopathic narcissism is depressingly evergreen.

Murch’s Dorothy (Fairuza Balk) is a hollow-eyed, Wednesday Addams breed of Kansas farm girl. She’s not so much plucky as traumatized. Auntie Em (Carrie‘s mom Piper Laurie) is concerned about her charge’s mental health as layabout Uncle Henry (Matt Clark) who’s only managed to rebuild half of their tornado-destroyed farmhouse, reads about a new clinic for the treatment of mental disorders. What Dr. Worley (Nicol Williamson) is really up to is electro-shock. The sequence where Dorothy, tied to a gurney like Rock Hudson in Seconds and wheeled down a sanitorium’s crooked hallway for “treatment,” is the stuff of nightmares. Lightning provides a diversion for Dorothy to escape with another patient (Emma Ridley), but once free they’re swept away by a raging flood. The next morning, only Dorothy and her pet chicken wash up in what’s left of Oz. The film will be full of narrow escapes that are not really escapes and sanctuaries that are prisons. The good guys before they win their pyrrhic victories. Its overriding feeling is doom.

Influenced by dark fare like Night of the Hunter and Roald Dahl’s “The Wish,” Return to Oz exists in a post-apocalyptic hellscape where “Wheelers,” monsters with wheels that squeak like Dorothy’s gurneys, threaten to chop little girls in pieces. Take note of the sound design of the film. It is, after all, Murch’s metier. Dorothy’s old friends have been turned to stone or sad, hoarder’s knick-knacks decorating an evil Nome King’s (Williamson again as claymation) parlor. Her only allies are wound-down clockwork soldier, a spindly, pumpkin-headed thing, and a reluctantly-reanimated moosehead that worries it’s not “well-made.” The effects work by a splinter group of former Jim Henson Creature Shop players is exquisitely, indescribably, deliciously wrong. But the moment Return to Oz really sings is a sequence where Dorothy falls through a psychedelic void while a very rich monarch complains about wanting more. “But you have so much,” Dorothy says. “That’s not the point,” he says, and so our late capitalist dystopia is formulated like a patient etherized on a table.

Return to Oz‘s two tones are “anxious” and “appalled.” It’s a recognizable state. Toto can’t catch up; Dorothy runs to a window just to see Auntie Em abandoning her; the Tin Man got that way through depressed self-mutilation; and a childlike Frankenstein (the film takes place on Halloween) calls Dorothy “mom”. Given an ending shaded by the possibility that Dorothy is hallucinating all this, electricity pulsing through her temples on a gurney somewhere, Return to Oz is about the trauma we repress to maintain an illusion of control amidst this maelstrom of venality and corruption. Beyond the horror of well-intended child abuse that forms the framing story for this sequel, the revelation that Dorothy’s guardians need to take out a second mortgage on their destroyed farmstead while borrowing to cover Dorothy’s healthcare is panic-inducing. In a contemporary review, Harlan Ellison wrote “Take your kids, let them scream, let your eyes drink in marvels. Return to Oz is everything we hoped for,” and it’s still that. It’s about you and me in this moment of our history. It’s a masterpiece.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic forfilmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Stream Return to Oz on Disney+